A blog documenting my research and writing
on my book project: "Beauty in Darkness: A history of BDSM", by Peter
Tupper. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

One thing I'd always hoped to witness, since I started to study
sexuality seriously, was the birth of a new fetish. To me, that would
like seeing a new species evolve right before your eyes.

I have yet to be the first to discover a fetish, but I'm always on
the lookout for new ones. The closest I've come is coming across the web
site, Tales of the Veils.
This site is devoted to stories and images of veiled women. This is not
about the cute little diaphanous veils worn by women in harem
fantasies. This is about heavy, full-body covering garments worn by
Muslim women living in strict purdah.
I believe, though this is the kind of thing which can't be proven, that
veil fetishism has grown in the past few years. The site quotes from a
Wikipedia article which seems to have disappeared:

The attacks of September 11, 2001, the War on Terrorism, the War in
Iraq, and other Middle Eastern related news topics have led to the rise
of photographs of veiled women appearing in the news. The rising
interest in Arabic and Islamic cultures may lead to veil fetishism
becoming more popular. One of the main reasons Muslim women wear veils
is to avoid being lusted after, which makes veil fetishism paradoxical
to them.

Many harem women in sexual fantasies portrayed in movies and on
television wear veils. Female servants often appear veiled fanning their
masters. Harem women exemplify being veiled for the preservation of
virginity and mystery.

In the 1999 movie The Mummy and the 2004 movie Hidalgo, actresses
flirt with men while veiled. In the 1992 movie Aladdin, three women
appear wearing only their colorful underwear and translucent veils. It
is not uncommon for women to appear veiled on Halloween in genie or
harem costumes. Christina Aguilera appeared veiled as a genie at a
promotion for her song "Genie in a Bottle." Lil Kim wore the top of a
burka for a picture. An actress will be veiled in a scene from Deuce
Bigalow: European Gigolo. The model Feiticeira, who has appeared in
Brazilian edition of Playboy twice, is almost always wearing a veil.

Many who have veil fetishes also have bondage fetishes. Women who
veil are restricted. Arab and other Muslim women are often seen in the
Western world as being veiled against their will; they are only doing it
for religious or social reasons (though many contend otherwise). Brian
Mitchell forced Elizabeth Smart to wear a veil during her captivity.
While the reason was to conceal her identity, he may have also had a
veil fetish. Women may become sexually aroused by veiling themselves.
They may feel protected, or feel similar enjoyment as women with bondage
fetishes.

The Veils site has plenty of fiction about hyper-restrictive and
hyper-concealing clothing. One story, "Shami's New Life", underlines the
paradox of how a social practice, which is supposed to keep men from
lusting after women from afar, actually makes some of them lust even
more.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked.

Shami knew immediately. What he held in his hand was completely
white, but she recognised the shape and material. “Oh no, please!” she
said. “Not a rubber bodysuit like my uncle used to make me wear!”

“Oh no, Shami babe, this is not like your uncle made you wear, not
at all. He was lenient. He had no imagination, no creativity. This one
is far better. Look! It covers all you body, not only up to your eyes
but over them. All your head in fact. Of course, your beautiful long
hair shall have to be shaved off for you to wear it, but that is alas,
an unfortunate necessity. And unlike your uncle’s pathetic contraption,
(which I designed, by the by), this one has a beautiful boned and laced
neck that shall keep you erect and noble at all times, and an even finer
laced and boned waist so you can be squeezed like a white memsahib in
her corset. And here, at the bottom you see, built in shoes, with
fifteen centimetre heels of course, and here, two little extras for my
personal pleasure; a hole for your love cavern and a hole for your arse
so I may spear you wherever and whenever I wish…”

“No! No! No!”

“…not that they’ll be empty at all other times of course. Look at
these rather fine – and rather large – dildos that I’ve acquired. Oh my
dear Shami, you are going to be such a picture in all this, and I’ve got
lots of different stuff for you to wear over the top of it too –
Afghani burqas, Paktoon burqas, Turkish khimars, Iranian chadors,
rubands, boushiyahs – not that you’ll ever see much of them of course,
these two tiny pinholes in the rubber hood don’t admit a lot of light…”

“Please Faisal, no, no not that!” Floods of tears streamed down our
heroine’s face as she begun to realise that there was no light at the
end of this tunnel. “Why, Faisal, why? I didn’t think that you were
religious!”

“Oh, I’m not, not at all. Can’t abide religion, most dull indeed.”

“Then why make me live in purdah? Only religious men expect their wives to live in purdah.”

“Oh no Shami baby, you’re wrong there, very wrong indeed. There are
two reasons why one should restrict and control a wife. One is very
virtuous and holy indeed. The other however is more inspired by Shaitan,
not Allah. Some men like to see suffering, to force unwilling girls
into bondage, to rob them of their dignity and freedoms and turn them
into items of bondage, lovetoys as it were. Some men are very sick, sick
like that.

And I’m afraid my dear, that you’ve just married one of them…”

That's what's weird about sex: every effort to repress and control it has a way of being turned into an erotic stimulus.

There's also a strong element of cultural crossdressing in veil fetishism. Take Latex Lady, for instance.

According to her blog (which I'm going to take at face value), Latex
Lady has lived for the past two years in a kind of latex purdah. Her
skin has felt nothing but latex, water and skin lotion. She hasn't seen
her own face without at least a transparent layer of latex in that time.
When she goes outdoors with her husband (also a latex fetishist), she
wears a latex burqa, which completely covers her, plus corsets, usually
severe bondage and a gag. People usually assume she is a Muslim women
living in purdah, and she does nothing to correct them. She even does
things like walk behind her husband, stand behind him while he sits and
eats at restaurants and has become "very well accustomed to only one
meal a day...I would not miss lunch."

The delight in fooling the world is a classic trait of transvestism,
but there's also the question of mimicking such an extreme form of the
restrictions of purdah. Such a regime, affecting every aspect of daily
routine and turning the simplest activities into challenges, turns one's
entire life into a liminoid ritual. The kind of discipline which used
to be found in religious orders, such as nun's vows, become in modern
Western society a form of recreation. As Arthur Munby wrote of Hannah
Cullwick:

...she was to become, and she has become, a noble and gentle
women, not only without the aid of technical helps, but in spite of
ignorance and lowly isolation, and by means of that very toil
and servile labour which is supposed to make a woman contemptible and
vulgar. Physical degradation was to be the channel, and even the source
of spiritual beauty. It has often been so, among religious women of old:
but, with an English maid servant, how would it be?

Diary of Arthur Munby, 26 May 1863

This mentality, the peverse, kinky way of looking at the world,
makes potentially anything a fetish. Take the art on the cover of the
paperback edition of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopian novel of a hyper-patriarchal future with rigorous sumptuary laws.

This image was doubtless selected to illustrate the idea that the
subjection of women (muteness) is linked to ideals of beauty and
consumerism (the jeweled gold chains fastening her lips together).
However, a person involved in the kink, fetish or body modification
subcultures would look at that image and think, "Hey, what a cool idea! I
wonder how that would feel?" It's a different way of looking at the
world.

Somewhere out there, I'm positive, at least one woman has had
masturbatory fantasies based on Atwood's book. That does not undermine
the feminist theme of the book. Remember, first lesson of postmodernism:
the text never has only one meaning.

Does this mean that women are somehow programmed by a patriarchal
society to eroticize their own oppression, like the women conditioned to
be fixated on their fur collars in Truffaut's film of Farenheit 451? Probably not, but that's another blog posting.

Here's irony for you. MuchMusic is playing Britney Spears' "I'm a Slave 4 U" as I type this.